Stereoscopic 3D has exploded within the past year to become the next big thing in displays. It is akin to the overturning of still imagery with movies, silence with sound, monochrome with color. In this talk I plan to give a current status and overview of the two key technology aspects of stereoscopic 3D, namely display and capture. Covering large cinema, medium TV and small personal displays on the one hand, with direct and computer graphical capture on the other.

Cinema dominates the 3D landscape with new film releases often outstripping available screens. Enabling this demand are several technologies that harness the widespread deployment of digital projection. Some rely on time sequential display while others the more conventional dual projection. Systems currently used in commercial theaters will be presented and described.

3D TVs are available in stores. The most common use active, shuttering eyewear and fast >120Hz displays to provide time sequential stereo imagery. Less common, but potentially more appealing, are passive eyewear solutions. Available commercially are patterned retarder, or Xpol based TVs that polarization encode alternate lines.

Eyewear cannot be used for mobile platforms so autostereoscopy is necessary. Fortunately, being single user, traditional barrier and lenticular approaches are feasible, but only those that are switchable.

Capture continues to be a challenge even for those creating Hollywood content. Stereo capture with two cameras is still complex requiring understanding of scene limitations that avoid depth distortion during replay. Geometric issues will be discussed and the state of camera rigs given.

Computer stereo content generation is more forgiving allowing composite images to be built up from separate capture geometries. Automatic implementation of these 'by hand' methods into the world of computer games is seen as key to 3D acceptance in the home. Current techniques will be briefly described completing the talk.

Mike Robinson has a Bachelors and Doctorate in Physics from the University of Oxford; completing the latter in 1986. After two years as a 'post-doc' at Oxford University, he moved to Boulder and became a Research Assistant Professor at Colorado University between 1988-1990 where he worked on Optical Computing Systems. Returning to Oxford, he worked for seven years at Sharp Laboratories of Europe where he specialized in digital projectors, only to return again to Boulder in 1998 to join ColorLink, a University of Colorado seeded company that developed and manufactured retarder based polarization filters. At ColorLink he was responsible for projection TV systems, patenting several system and device designs that were eventually commercialized by JVC, Sony, Hitachi and others. ColorLink was bought by RealD three and a half years ago. As Chief Scientist of RealD, his primary responsibility is in the development of consumer display technologies such as 3D TVs, but is also involved in many other aspects of 3D technology including stereoscopic capture.

Lunch Break

1:00-1:50pm

Lunch Time Discussion Round Table
An informal discussion of various stereoscopic topics over lunch.
The topic for each day will be announced at the conference.
Grab some lunch and meet at the reserved table near the SD&A conference room - limited numbers.

The annual informal dinner for SD&A attendees. An opportunity to meet with colleagues and discuss the latest advances. There is no host for the dinner. Information on venue and cost will be provided on the day at the conference.

Lunch Time Discussion Round Table
An informal discussion of various stereoscopic topics over lunch.
The topic for each day will be announced at the conference.
Grab some lunch and meet at the reserved table near the SD&A conference room - limited numbers.

There has been a lot of recent discussion in the media about the potential dangers of 3DTVs and 3D Movies - and yet stereoscopes have been with us for over 150 years, 3D movies for over 50 years, and 3D viewing is also widely used in industry. 3DTV is, however, transitioning from a special event to a 24/7 experience and becoming available to a wider demographic. Where is the truth in the concerns being expressed, where are the falsehoods, and where are the gaps in our knowledge? The panelists will give their views on this important topic.

This year's demonstration session is again a combined event with the entire Electronic Imaging Symposium. The symposium-wide demonstration session open to all attendees. Demonstrators will provide interactive, hands-on demonstrations of a wide-range of products related to Electronic Imaging. The session will have a focused "Stereoscopic Displays & Applications" area.

The demonstration session hosts a vast collection of electronic stereoscopic displays - there’s no better way to witness so many stereoscopic displays with your own two eyes than at this one session!

We have explored how light propagates from thin elements into a volume for viewing for both automultiscopic displays and holograms. In particular, devices that are typically connected with geometric optics, like parallax barriers, differ in treatment from those that obey physical optics, like holograms. However, the two concepts are often used to achieve the same effect of capturing or displaying a combination of spatial and angular information. Our work connects the two approaches under a general framework based in ray space, from which insights into applications and limitations of both parallax-based and holography-based systems are observed.

Both parallax barrier systems and the practical holographic displays are limited in that they only provide horizontal parallax. Mathematically, this is equivalent to saying that they can always be expressed as a rank-1 matrix (i.e, a matrix in which all the columns are linearly related). Knowledge of this mathematical limitation has helped us to explore the space of possibilities and extend the capabilities of current display types. In particular, we have designed a display that uses two LCD panels, and an optimisation algorithm, to produce a content-adaptive automultiscopic display (SIGGRAPH Asia 2010).

In other work we have developed a 6D optical system that responds to changes in viewpoint as well as changes in surrounding light. Our lenticular array alignment allows us to achieve such a system as a passive setup, omitting the need for electrical components. Unlike traditional 2D flat displays, our 6D displays discretize the incident light field and modulate 2D patterns in order to produce super-realistic (2D) images. By casting light at variable intensities and angles onto our 6D displays, we can produce multiple images as well as store greater information capacity on a single 2D film (SIGGRAPH 2008).

Ramesh Raskar joined the Media Lab from Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories in 2008 as head of the Lab's Camera Culture research group. His research interests span the fields of computational photography, inverse problems in imaging and human-computer interaction. Recent inventions include transient imaging to look around a corner, next generation CAT-Scan machine, imperceptible markers for motion capture (Prakash), long distance barcodes (Bokode), touch+hover 3D interaction displays (BiDi screen), low-cost eye care devices (Netra) and new theoretical models to augment light fields (ALF) to represent wave phenomena.

In 2004, Raskar received the TR100 Award from Technology Review, which recognizes top young innovators under the age of 35, and in 2003, the Global Indus Technovator Award, instituted at MIT to recognize the top 20 Indian technology innovators worldwide. In 2009, he was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship. In 2010, he received the Darpa Young Faculty award. He holds 42 US patents and has received four Mitsubishi Electric Invention Awards. He is currently co-authoring a book on Computational Photography. http://raskar.info

Lunch/Exhibition Break

12:40-2:00pm

Lunch Time Discussion Round Table
An informal discussion of various stereoscopic topics over lunch.
The topic for each day will be announced at the conference.
Grab some lunch and meet at the reserved table near the SD&A conference room - limited numbers.

The annual Electronic Imaging All-Conference Reception provides a wonderful opportunity to get to know and interact with new and old SD&A colleagues. Plan to join us for this relaxing and enjoyable event.

Join us when we try to get screen size, viewing distance, divergence
tolerance and FoFix(r) into our stereoscopic abacus. Then we'll
consider side effects like floating windows into a TV bezel, or
multi-purposing 3D content for Palmtops, TV and Cinema.

Photonics West Exhibits Visit
The Photonics West Exhibit is one of the largest exhibitions of optics and photonics related products worldwide.
Free buses from the Electronic Imaging Hotel to the Moscone Center (and return) are provided - free registration is necessary to use the Photonics West bus. Register for the Photonics West exhibits here.